They suffocated in bed, committed suicide, succumbed to disease — 145 Alberta children died in foster care since 1999, and the government hasn’t told you

In the last 14 years, 145 children have died in government care, nearly triple the number previously reported by the province. Many, like the child this father mourns at a gravesite west of Edmonton, were just infants.

Photograph by: Ed Kaiser
, Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON - The Alberta government has dramatically under-reported the number of child welfare deaths over the past decade, undermining public accountability and thwarting efforts at prevention and reform.

A six-month Edmonton Journal-Calgary Herald investigation found 145 foster children have died since 1999, nearly triple the 56 deaths revealed in government annual reports over the same period.

It is the first definitive count of child welfare fatalities in Alberta, based on death records unsealed by the province after a four-year legal battle. The figure includes all of the children who died in government care after child protection workers apprehended them from their families to keep them safe.

Crucially, however, the count is not yet complete: The ministry has not released death records for at-risk children that the government did not yet apprehend, or for children who were returned to their parents after time in care.

Journalists have identified at least 49 such children. There are likely dozens more.

This startling number of unpublicized deaths highlights the failure of a child death review system blighted by secrecy, disorganization, weak oversight and unmonitored recommendations.

To uncover the number of deaths, the Journal and Herald undertook an unprecedented review of 3,000 pages of ministry death records, historical fatality inquiry reports and lawsuits spanning 14 years.

An exhaustive analysis of those documents revealed alarming trends the government has never identified: A third of children who die in care are babies, another third are teenagers, and the vast majority are aboriginal.

These are their stories.

A boy makes a suicide pact with his mother and hangs himself in a group home. A girl is found slain and frozen in a ditch; another drinks herself to death. A mentally ill boy lays down on the railway tracks, his head gets crushed.

More than a dozen babies died inexplicably in their sleep, and many more died from preventable, sleep-related incidents. One died twisted in a foster parent’s bedsheets, another suffocated in a collapsed bassinet, a third succumbed to untreated pneumonia while sleeping on the floor.

Among teens, more than two dozen young aboriginals overdosed on drugs, were beaten or stabbed to death, or committed suicide by hanging from basement rafters, playground equipment and closet bar rods.

Three teens were found frozen outside, including two boys who died of hypothermia in a backyard and a public park. When a 14-year-old girl from the Sunchild First Nation was found frozen in a ditch, officials assumed she, too, had died from hypothermia. An autopsy found she had been killed and dumped. The government made no mention of her death.

Alberta child welfare workers apprehended all of these children from their families, in an effort to protect them from harm. Instead, they died.

(To put the number of deaths into context, there are about 8,500 to 9,000 children in care in Alberta at any one time, according to data from the past five years.)

A fraction of the deaths were subject to investigation, and in cases where reviews were completed, recommendations were not tracked or monitored for implementation.

Alberta has no system for studying trends among children who die in provincial care.

“We owe it to the child victims to not only learn from their tragic deaths, but to prevent such tragedies in the future,” says Gord Phaneuf, chief executive of the Child Welfare League of Canada. “We need to commit to this. There really are no more compelling issues than protecting vulnerable babies, toddlers, children and youth from preventable deaths, and from child maltreatment deaths in particular.”

Phaneuf says governments must study individual deaths in the context of all child deaths, looking to identify which children are most at risk, and why.

“When you start to put the data together, and you do it over extended periods of time, you can discern patterns and trends that tell a very important and compelling story. We need that.”

The Journal and Herald obtained the internal death records through a freedom of information request submitted by the Journal in 2009, that trigged a four-year legal battle. In June 2013, Alberta’s information and privacy commissioner ruled in the Journal’s favour and ordered the province to release death records dating back to Jan. 1, 1999. The records were to include age, ethnicity and circumstances of death for each child, along with recommendations that resulted from the deaths.

This September, the Ministry of Human Services released the internal death records for children who died while receiving in-care services, which means they were apprehended from their families and placed in group homes, foster or kinship care.

The ministry did not release death records for children who were reported to be at risk but were not apprehended, nor did they release death records for children who had been returned to their parents after time in care.

The Journal and Herald’s investigation into failures of the $684-million child intervention system also examined Alberta’s child death review process, and found the process is mired in secrecy and bureaucracy. Dozens of elected officials, political appointees and bureaucrats operate in six different bodies under two different ministries and three different laws.

Recommendations that emerge from these bodies are not binding on government, they are not tracked or monitored for implementation and are not reviewed to see if changes have been effective in preventing child deaths.

People who work inside the system are barred from speaking publicly about their experiences and even the parents of deceased children cannot utter their dead child’s name, for fear of breaking a law that bans the identification of children in care, even after they die.

In the end, the fallout from these deaths is widespread: 12 lawsuits totalling more than $8.7 million, 13 lengthy criminal trials, and the incalculable emotional toll paid by parents, foster parents and child protection workers responsible for children in the care of the state.

Yet in an interview for this series, Human Services Minister Dave Hancock expressed satisfaction with the way the system works. He noted that there are some areas of duplication — and some room for improvement — but overall he concluded that child deaths in Alberta were getting the appropriate amount of investigation and review in the ministry.

In the last 14 years, 145 children have died in government care, nearly triple the number previously reported by the province. Many, like the child this father mourns at a gravesite west of Edmonton, were just infants.